End of Tenancy Cleaning in Sparkhill

What an inventory clerk checks in a Sparkhill let room

An inventory clerk in Sparkhill is checking one room and the shared parts against a check-in record, and the failures are predictable. Kitchenettes in converted rooms have small ovens that have never been cleaned inside, hoods with original filters and a gap beside the cooker filled with a year of spillage. Shared bathrooms show mould in the sealant above all, because the water here is soft and scale simply is not the argument. Skirtings, door frames and door tops get written up every single time. Deposits on a room-only tenancy are modest, so what is really at stake for the landlord is void days, and a room that fails a viewing costs more in a fortnight than the clean ever did.

• Single rooms handed back individually, with the rest of the house still occupied and in use
• Small ovens and hoods in converted kitchenettes, checked inside and behind by the clerk
• Shared bathrooms judged on mould in the grout and sealant, since soft Birmingham water rules scale out
• Void days rather than deposits driving the urgency, because a room must be viewable almost immediately
• Agents managing dozens of rooms in B11 who need the same standard reached every time without supervision

The let room first, then its share of kitchen and bathroom

We work to the check-in record where the agent has kept one, and to the checklist clerks use where nobody can find it. The let room is done first and completely: oven and hob if it has them, cupboards inside and out, wardrobe and drawer interiors, skirtings, frames, switches, sills, glass and floor. Then the shared kitchen and bathroom, which is where the report gets written. We photograph the room on completion and send it before we leave, so an agent in an office elsewhere can release it for viewing without driving over to look. Tenants who are staying get worked around, never asked to move.

• The outgoing room finished end to end before we touch anything shared, so it can be shown immediately
• Completion photographs sent the same day, which is what lets an agent re-let a room without a site visit
• Shared kitchen and bathroom included by default, because those are the areas an incoming tenant judges
• Occupied rooms left alone with their doors kept shut while we work the landing and the shared kitchen

More detail on the equipment and the order of work: end of tenancy cleaning across Birmingham.

Room-by-room turnarounds, all twelve months

Changeovers here have no season. Rooms come free every week of the year across the licensed houses on the villa roads and the terraces running towards the park, so the pattern is a steady drumbeat and never a summer wave. The person arranging the clean is usually an agent or a landlord managing a lot of stock in B11, and there is always a deadline attached. Access is usually a keysafe or a remaining tenant letting us in. Where an agent has three or four rooms free on neighbouring streets, they can be booked into one day.

Own cooker or shared kitchen: what shifts a room price

A single let room with a shared bathroom is one of the cheapest jobs on our list and it is meant to be. What moves the figure is whether the room has its own cooking facilities, how bad the oven is, whether the shared kitchen and bathroom are included, and whether the previous tenant left belongings behind. Clearance is not something we do, so the room needs emptying first, because we cannot clean a floor under bin bags. Landlords and agents with several rooms a month can send photographs each time for a quick fixed quote. Full-building turnarounds are quoted separately.

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Once per room per tenancy, at several doors a year

Once per room per tenancy, and in Sparkhill that can mean the same building being visited five or six times a year at different doors. Landlords running short tenancies will need it more often than that. The useful discipline is booking the clean the moment notice is given rather than the day the keys come back, because at the volume this area turns over, a same-day slot is not something we can promise anybody in advance.